You Can’t Be Serious(78)

He nodded. Awkward silence.

My next drink was a beer. The bartender put the bottle down in front of me and Josh smoothly reached into his back pocket and pulled out a second koozie. He handed it to me; I accepted. I wrapped it around my dumb beer and said, “Thanks for the handwarmer.” We had a third date.

Josh showed up at my door for date number three with his understated smile, an eighteen-pack of Coors Light, and two koozies. Points won. My TV was already set to SpongeBob SquarePants because I’m a romantic. As he sat down, I went into the kitchen to put the drinks in the fridge.

When I got back, there was a NASCAR prerace show on my television. At first I thought he had made some kind of mistake, or that the show he actually wanted to watch was about to start, but no. This dude had arrived, sat down, turned off my SpongeBob SquarePants, and turned on NASCAR, without even flinching. Points immediately rescinded.

What the heck was he doing? NASCAR? This was not part of the plan. If Josh had suggested watching NASCAR together, I would have pretended to have gotten called into work for something very top secret and important.1 I stared at Josh with a deer-in-the-headlights look, but he didn’t see it because he was already way, way into what was happening on the TV. I was stuck, so I did the only thing a nice guy could do in a situation like that: I tried to be a good sport and not DIE OF BOREDOM watching a NASCAR prerace show with some dude I had really only met twice.

Why is there even such a thing as NASCAR prerace? Watching my Yankees on the YES Network or getting some pregame stats before the Knicks hit the court made sense to me. What the heck is there to say about drivers in fast cars who are about to make left turns all day? Josh remained totally transfixed as a commentator exclaimed, “Hoo-wee, don’t forget that trouble Denny Hamlin had last week gettin’ loose comin’ outta turn four.”

What did these words mean? With the subtitles on, I’d have still been lost. On-screen, one commentator with ridiculously amazing hair and a Jon-Stewart-doing-his-impression-of-Lindsey-Graham flamboyance talked about whether driver so-and-so had an advantage on today’s track as opposed to last week’s track because today’s track was much longer. Huh. I didn’t know the tracks were different lengths. I guess that was kind of interesting, but not enough to keep my focus. The commentators turned things over to an excited man in a brightly colored suit with black square glasses and a ginger beard.

His name was Rutledge Wood. As I sat with Josh, halfway through a still-perfectly-cold-because-of-the-koozie beer, I found myself temporarily drawn in by the badassness of the guy on TV. Rutledge. Wood. That’s a pretty cool name, actually. And he’s articulate. Maybe this guy can make sense of what I’m see— Is that a talking doll?

The screen cut from Rutledge to… a puppet named Danny Hammerdropper: light brown mustache, dressed in a hat with the number 88 on it, holding a microphone. In a high-pitched puppety southern drawl, he yelled, “Dale Junior ah love youuuuu!”2 I looked back at Josh, who was still watching intently as if all of this was perfectly normal. Sure, Josh was handsome, smart, relaxed, and had amazing eyes. But it was all too much. I knew right then this would really never work out. I just had to get through the next few hours and that would be that.

The race began. Half an hour in, a sort of madness crept in. My limited downtime is important to me. How did I get myself into this situation? What if these races go on for hours and hours, like golf? I don’t think I’ll be able to stand watching cars go around for— BOOM!! A car with a duck logo violently crashed into a car with a beer logo. The lights around the track suddenly flashed bright yellow as the duck logo car erupted into massive flames. Holy shit! No human could ever survive such an inferno. The driver, clearly deceased, was no longer in control of the vehicle, and the flaming duck car sped off the track and spun out on some grass before smashing into a wall. “OH MY GOD! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?! DID HE HAVE A FAMILY?!”

Josh took a sip of his beer and mumbled, “It’s jussalittle ohlfaar.”

“A WHAT?!”

“Jussalittle ohlfaar.”

“WHAT’S AN OHLFAAR?!”

Josh casually took another sip of his beer and enunciated: “It’s. Just. A Litt-tull. OIL. FIE-errrr.”

Just a little oil fire? I looked back at the TV as the dead driver casually pulled himself out of the burning duck car and walked away as if nothing happened. Wow. The crowd loved it—and I had to admit, I kinda did too.

We had more dates.

I asked lots more questions about NASCAR during those subsequent hangouts.

“Why does the guy on the lifeguard stand wave different flags?”

“It’s called a starter’s stand—that’s the start/finish line. Different colors mean different things: green for go, yellow for caution, checkered when the race is over.”

“Why are they all racing in a row, like why don’t the drivers just try to pass each other?”

“They do try to pass each other! That’s the whole point! When you’re going two hundred miles an hour in close quarters, it’s hard!”

“If that’s the case, why don’t people just watch the last ten minutes to see who wins instead of sitting through hours of this?”

“Because the last ten minutes is… not the whole race. What kind of question is that? Would you only watch the last ten minutes of a basketball game, because that’s when you see who wins?”